The Land of the Binge

The Land of the Binge

February 9, 2013

Frank Bruni

AROUND the time that Netflix released an entire season of “House of Cards” at once, so that viewers could gorge on all 13 episodes, a friend sent me a plaintive e-mail about the way that foodie-favored restaurants give her no option other than gorging.

She misses salads. (Yes, it’s possible. Really.) She’s nostalgic for healthy sides. In one place where she recently dined, she ordered kale, only to find that it was fried and, adding insult to artery, pummeled with candied pancetta. In another place, slivers of pastrami accessorized an unsuspecting salmon. She encounters bacon on brussels sprouts, bacon in sundaes and martinis, bacon, bacon everywhere, along with marrow and liver and lard.

“It’s all or nothing,” she wrote, flagging a dichotomy: cooking in trendy restaurants has never been fattier, while the trend of “cleansing” with a severe regimen of liquefied fruits, vegetables and nuts has never been hotter. Feast or famine. Binge or beet juice.

I turned from her lament to the front page of The Times. It reported the accidental death of someone participating in the X Games, a magnet for “extreme athletes,” as the article called them. The word “extreme” stuck with me and struck a chord. We compete extremely (look at Lance). Work out extremely (look all around you). Eat extremely. Watch extreme amounts of whatever we’ve decided we love, which we love in extremis. Even our weather is extreme: superstorms, Frankenstorms, snowmageddons.

And of course extreme campaign spending has contributed to extreme partisanship, the left seeing little merit or valor in just about anyone on the right, the right seeing the whole world with a tunnel vision that’s extremely eerie. The deficit of comity has led to the imminent spending cuts known as sequestration, which is an extreme answer to Congress’s failure to agree on a course of moderation.

Moderation. Remember that? It was once held up as an indisputable virtue, virtually synonymous with prudence. Don’t get too carried away with any one thing. Don’t become too set in your ways. That was the message from parents and teachers. That was the cue the culture gave.

Frank Bruni

Earl Wilson / The New York Times

But America these days is an immoderate land of fixed opinions and outsize fixations. More and more we wallow: in our established political philosophy; in our preferred interest group; in our pastime of choice; in whichever health routine we’ve turned into a health religion.

I BLAME the Internet. Well, that and social media and cable television, with its infinity of channels. In theory our hyperconnectivity and surfeit of possibilities have broadened our universes, speeding us to distant galaxies, fresh discoveries and new information. But in reality they’ve just as often had a narrowing effect, enabling us to dwell longer on, and burrow deeper into, one way of being, one mode of thinking.

Whether you’re predisposed to a conservative or liberal view, you can set your bookmarks to Web sites that reinforce what you already believe, take a similar tack with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, and turn for news to Fox News or MSNBC, each an echo chamber for like minds.

And many Americans do just that. The prime-time audiences for Fox News and MSNBC increased significantly between 2011 and 2012, while CNN’s prime-time audience dropped. The percentage of swing voters seemed to shrink, and over the last two decades, the percentage of voters who label themselves “moderate” has similarly declined.

There’s more extremism on the right than on the left: President Obama’s health care reform and push to raise taxes don’t come anywhere near the socialism that his Tea Party nemeses, themselves much more rigid, rant about. Above all, there’s gridlock. It’s hard to make much progress when reciprocal distrust is this extreme.

We’re immoderate not just in our affiliations, but also in our impulses. “Work Out So Hard You Vomit” proclaimed a headline on Slate.com not so long ago; the story with it presented a tour through the long, grueling trials to which the fitness-intent subject themselves.

Ben Wiseman

Never mind studies that suggest that moderate exertion — less than 20 miles of running a week, not more, and at a stately pace — bodes best for well-being. A growing group of people want the more extreme experience of military-style boot camps and obstacle courses like those in the Tough Mudder program, whose adherents forgo the treadmill and its individual TV screen for the exhilaration of crawling under barbed wire and swerving around flames. Bye, bye, Jack LaLanne. Hello, “Full Metal Jacket.”

I’m even more impressed with our food obsessions, being such a food-obsessive myself. Organic, gluten, lactose, carbohydrate: people structure whole diets around binding vocabularies, and not always because they have an affliction compelling them to.

And actual diets, by which I mean those aimed at superfluous chins, are flamboyantly ascetic, with solid food exiting the equation for three days, for five days, even for 10. The BluePrintCleanse, the Cooler Cleanse and other retail juice fasts have surged in popularity over recent years. Sales of juice extractors are also on the upswing. Even our self-punishment is indulgent. We binge on deprivation.

And we binge, period. Over the last decade, ambitious young chefs have jockeyed to one-up one another when it comes to fried, funky excess. I thought the situation had reached some gluttonous apotheosis with the Los Angeles restaurant Animal, where a porky meal I ate in early 2009 included foie gras on a biscuit doused in both maple syrup and pork-sausage gravy.

But since then, there’s been renewed respect for poutine, a dish of French fries, gravy and cheese. Chicago welcomed Au Cheval, where there’s potato hash with duck-heart gravy and a fried bologna sandwich. And a place in Queens went ahead and called itself Salt & Fat. Its beet salad has pepperoni chips. Its apple salad has candied walnuts and speck. And the foie gras comes with bacon brittle.

The verb “binge” applies as never before to television viewing. What Netflix was acknowledging with its “House of Cards” release was the widespread habit of storing up hours of a favorite show or buying a whole season so that you can marinate for an entire weekend in Claire Danes’s twitchy dread. So that you can choose your one mood, your one note, and revel in it.

But when does a luxury become a rut? And if we each hunker down in some tightly proscribed burg, don’t we lose common ground? That possibility explains the fusty maxim of “moderation in all things,” which wasn’t so much a wet towel over passion as a caution against single-mindedness. And a warning about bacon.